After trying all kinds of methods without seeing Debian running on my 500G mbwe (blue light, single hard drive version). Since I don't have a serial cable, I can't see what comes up at boot time to debug. Angry and frustrated, I decided to try this dirty trick to see what kind of hybrid monster would boot (if it would boot at all). But it did boot up and works fine as Debian Lenny! Strange. Hopefully I'm not the only lucky one trying this trick.

This is what I did to have Debian Lenny working on my single hard drive 500G mbwe.

Open the mbwe box and connect its hard drive with stock firmware to a Linux machine.

Connect a new hard drive to the Linux machine. This will be used as the hard drive with Debian Lenny for the mbwe box. You can try it on the stock hard drive if you don't mind the risk of losing data on it.

dd the first 10GB of data on the stock hard drive to the new hard drive.

Connect the new hard drive to the mbwe box and see if it boots. Ping it and log in to see if it works OK. If it does, that's good.

Take the new hard drive out and connect it to the Linux machine. Mount the first partition of the new hard drive. Back up the files in this partition to a safe location, then delete them all. Now the first partition will be empty.

Moment of truth. Boot the mbwe box. No light will come on telling you it's ready. Just put your ear next to the hard drive and check if it's cranking. Also try to ping it, check your router to see if it has given the mbwe an IP address, use AngryIP to scan your whole subnet, or do whatever it takes to find the IP address of the mbwe (if it gets one). If it has an IP address that you can ping, you're in business! ssh that address with username root and password mybook will let you in.

If the above sounds like a lot of words, I'll make it simple. All that needs to be done is to remove the original file system on the first partition and replace it with the Debian Lenny file system compiled by Mario.

The reason I made the instructions vague is because I don't know if it works for anyone other than me, so I want more experienced users to have a crack first. If the success rate is good, then more detailed instructions will follow.

Good luck. I hope it works because I'd to say I've given something back to the community.

You know, now that I think about it, you can actually install Debian Lenny without unplugging the drive(s).
I can make a firmware upgrade with the Debian Lenny rootfs.ext2. But I have no intention to test it at this point.
Anyway, as long as there's someone brave enough to test it, I'll assemble the FW.

Yeah, it's a great idea for people reluctant to open their case, but love to try out Debian Lenny (Debian FTW lol). Replacing the file system is a lot safer than messing with mbr and boot sectors.

This is what I found out on my hybrid beast. Mario's kernel modules (leds, fan etc) didn't work. I found out after plugging in an external USB drive and nothing came up. I did an lsmod and nothing was loaded. So I manually did an insmod on one of Mario's kernel modules and an error came up. I thought this would be a lousy way to use Debian. So I did another stupid thing. I tried to insmod an original module. And it worked again! At this point I was jumping up and down like an idiot. A bad thing has turned good. Because now I can theoretically use Debian with all the original modules, including the power button, that a lot of people miss on their Lenny mbwe.

These are the original modules I've loaded that are currently working on my Lenny

No, it's an independent one. Also, there's no such thing as "my Lenny" yet :) Just LDSO_RUNPATH-enabled firmware - http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/ldso-runpath-enabled-firmware
But kernel and modules are all built "from scratch" in v3 and power button works just fine.
There were also some things messed up in leon config in Mario's kernel. Perhaps that's why it won't work.

Pfhew, finally done:http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=5caef65db4676113d5a101cf914073b47a802e7f33fdbd0d
I really can't tell whether it will work, so sorry if not. Note that /dev/md3 partition is supposed to be preserved and that it's not mounted anywhere in /etc/fstab, so, most likely, you'll only have to restore /dev/md1 if something goes wrong. I made some changes in rootfs and, in theory, this FW should work on two-disk boxs as well as one-disk.
If it successfully installs and you're able to login via SSH as 'root' with password 'mybook', then remember a couple of things:
1. If you have a two-disk version, edit /etc/modules: change 'negative_led_logic=0' to 'negative_led_logic=1' and 'invert_leds=1' to 'invert_leds=0'
2. You should also edit /usr/sbin/temperature_monitor: change

There's Debian repos with a great deal of packages and continued support. Also, the original firmware runs busybox, which is actually "sort-of-linux" for embedded systems, while Debian is.. well, a full-fledged Debian:)

Optware is usually for thoese ppl that want to keep the firmware compatible with the stock one. You cannot directly compare debian with optware. Debian is building everything from ground up, including kernel & glibc. When some optware package fails, there're many factors, including upstream bug, libc problems (uclibc incompatibility), even kernel problem.

Tried "MyLenny" myself… Was hanging on checkfs.sh, and after removing it mybook booted fine. There are some issues with raid on my two-disk box, but it should be fine with a one-disk version.

What? You mean Optware works with Lenny on my mbwe?

Optware doesn't work with Lenny, after all, my bad :)

BTW.. Getting a completely other distro running on it is already most of the fun… Respect!

Thnx, but I merely used WD's firmware upgrade and Mario's rootfs with some modifications :)

Personally, I think it's "better" to just replace busybox with optware tools and bash as its console….

The main reason to install Debian in my case is an odd problem I have with torrent-clients. Both rtorrent and transmission (and some more) hang my router after some period of activity, others are slow (bitflu) or buggy and banned on many trackers (btpd).